This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

War of 1812: Not as much fun as you think

Military re-enactors are far removed from the blood and brutality of early 19th-century warfare.

Re-enactors dressed as American troops fire a cannon during a reenactment of the 1814 Battle of Longwoods west of London. (May 5, 2012) (Glenn Lowson for the Toronto Star)

By Mark Bourrie

Sat., Sept. 29, 2012

A couple of years ago, I was leaned on to write about the War of 1812. It would be fun to be part of the action, publishers and profs were telling me. And I could get to hang around with all those fun guys who have such a great time doing battle re-enactments.

I love history, I’ve written lots about war (especially war coverage, censorship and propaganda), and Hallowe’en is right up there among my favourite holidays. Old uniforms are kind of cool, old weapons are delightful, and camping out in the rain strengthens character.

But war re-enactment? Meh. Not unless they use live ammunition.

Because without live ammunition, war re-enactors are just playing toy soldier.

They march. They fire blanks at each other. A few fall down. And that’s not how it was at all.

Article Continued Below

Take cannon fire. Watching a line of weekend re-enactors worked over by an artillery battery would be a real eye-opener, rather than just the noisy silliness we see when they use blanks. A ball fired from the cannons of 200 years ago travelled so slowly that you could actually see it coming for a second or two before it took off your head or disemboweled you.

That’s where discipline comes in. Well-disciplined soldiers didn’t duck, they took it like men. It was considered quite dishonourable to dodge and let the guy behind you take the hit, even though the ball and your body parts were likely to shred him anyway. We’d see which re-enactors had put real effort into drilling and acquired the discipline it took to be a real War of 1812-era soldier.

And grapeshot . . . well, that’s even more spectacular. There are lots of eyewitness accounts of rows of men falling like harvested wheat as buckets of small cannon balls tore into their bodies at relatively short range.

William “Tiger” Dunlop was lucky enough to catch the action at Lundy’s Lane in late July, 1814. Dunlop was a 21-year-old surgeon’s assistant with the 89th British Foot regiment. And he was pretty much the only thing resembling a doctor on the scene when the battle was over.

“I had 220 wounded turned in upon me that morning,” he says in his autobiography with the lack of gratitude that comes with youth. “It would be a useful lesson to cold-blooded politicians, who calculate a war costing so many lives and so many limbs as they would calculate on a horse costing so many pounds — or to the thoughtless at home, whom the excitement of a gazette, or the glare of an illumination, more than reconciles to the expense of war — to witness such a scene, if only for an hour.”

And this proto-peacenik had the nerve to quote an American woman who came to the battlefield under a flag of truce to find her 60-year-old husband, who had been shot in the gut and leg, and who had been left to die:

“O that the King and President were both here this moment to see the misery their quarrels lead to — they surely would never have gone to war without a cause that they could give as a reason to God at the last day, for thus destroying the creatures that He hath made in his own image.”

Now, this was obviously a woman who did not realize the heroic implications of this incredible war. And she had the nerve to drag the Almighty into her bleating.

Sailors, too, had great opportunities for heroic personal sacrifice in Canada’s War of Independence. Take the men of the USS Niagara and the USS Lawrence. They had been raked with cannon balls and grapeshot during the Battle of Lake Erie in September 1813. Dr. Usher Parsons was the only doctor around when the battle was over (the other American doctor had a nervous breakdown, and no one seemed to be willing to give him the shake and the slap across the head that he obviously needed). Parsons was left with 150 wounded.

At least he had the good sense to find the exercise entertaining, though a tad taxing. One sailor had a wound that was so interesting that Dr. Parsons mentioned it five years later in a piece he wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine:

“(A) canister shot twice the size of a musket ball entered the eye, and on the fifth or sixth day was detected at the inside angle of the lower jaw and cut out. On its passage it must have fractured the orbital sphenoid bone, and passing under the temporal arch, inside the process of the lower jaw, must have done great injury to the temporal muscles, and other soft parts, lying in the way.”

Some people seem to be getting the message.

In mid-September, two women were slightly injured while taking part in a mock battle at a California tall ship festival when someone loaded a cannon with buckshot instead of blanks. Amazing Grace fired real ammunition at the Bill of Rights, delighting the crowd and giving the two participants a lifetime of memories of what war really was like.

Mark Bourrie’s latest book is Fighting Words: Canada’s Best War Reporting, published Sept. 15 by Dundurn Press.

More from the Toronto Star & Partners

LOADING

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com